You only think the life of a free-taker is easy.
They get handy scores, they get to sit out of drills, they’re treated like royalty and cut some slack for not contributing as much from open play. It’s as strong as the Goalkeepers’ Union, the free-takers’ group. They’re a special breed and they look out for one another.
You hear pundits on national TV rating a fellow set-piece expert higher than anyone else does. They’d write inches and inches of columns and call everyone else mad for not thinking the same way as they do. Everyone needs a free-taker but there’s no denying that there’s a divide between the dead ball experts and the… not dead ball experts.
That’s why, of the 17 GAA people you’ll find doing a warm-up, the free-taker will have delegated his own special role for himself.
They’re such identifiable characters now that they’re their own classic club players.
Are you the classic free-taker or did the beer find you? https://t.co/q9NX4L2dlG #GAA
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) October 30, 2016
And they have their own generalised traits.
In fairness to free-takers though, they do a hell of a lot of work to perfect their shooting. It doesn’t come by chance that they’re guaranteed starters. They’re guaranteed because they can make guarantees. They can promise the manager and the team certain scores in every game but, to do that, they have to work.
They have to put in the hours and the shooting practice. They have to take a bag of balls to the pitch when everyone else is skiving and they have to shoot and then shoot some more.
But they can say goodbye to having to run in behind the goals to retrieve the balls they kicked. They can forget about forcing under-12s to stand there to kick them back out. There’s a new invention in the rugby world and it is bloody brilliant. A ball that can be returned with the push of a button.
This hasn’t been found in any stores as of yet so it obviously isn’t available now for mass distribution. But as soon as this drops in the rugby world, someone really needs to get that into a size five O’Neill’s ball.
Colm Parkinson is joined by Paul Rouse for a heated debate about Sky Sports’ five-year GAA deal and an exclusive chat with AFL star Zach Tuohy on the new GAA Hour. Subscribe here on iTunes
